Health/Politics: Cover the Uninsured Week

This week (May 1-8) is Cover the Uninsured Week, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Despite my recent laziness, I am going to try to post information on the uninsured all week. I personally believe that it is a national embarrassment that we have people without access to healthcare in the United States. I believe this is a basic violation of human rights, but if you don't buy that argument for the uninsured, there are many other reasons why you should be concerned about the rising number of uninsured persons in the United States, such as the negative effect that a large number of uninsured people have on the health care of an entire community.
One quick example: in Arizona, a bill was passed in 11/2/04that aims to restrict illegal immigrant's access to public, tax-payer funded services. Many want this bill to also restrict nonemergent health care coverage (provided by the public health authority and other taxpayer-funded sources) access to illegal immigrants, but thankfully this has not occurred. Now let us take a step back and think logically about some of the possible effects of restricting health care to illegal immigrants- there are a large percentage of illegal, uninsured immigrants in Arizona, who bring with them all of those infectious diseases that we only read about in our infectious disease books - you know, things like leprosy and TB, diseases that also happen to be highly transmissible to other people. If you deny illegal immigrants treatment for such infectious diseases simply because they are not taxpayers, you are also increasing the risk of spreading diseases to others in the community. Infectious diseases know no insurance status boundaries, and having a population with untreated TB and leprosy does not exactly do much to increase the public health of a community (and yes, Maricopa County in Arizona actually has one of the 4 leprosy (Hansen's Disease) clinics located in the United States). The illegal status of the immigrants adds some complexity to this tale of the uninsured, but it does demonstrate one way in which the health of the uninsured affects everybody in a community. This same theory could be applied to the lower rates of childhood immunization in areas where the levels of insurance are also low. Even if you do not believe that health care is a right, you might want to at least be concerned on how a lack of health care in others affects you. More to come....